Happy Day Before Valentine’s Day! Or, as I have now learned, Galentine’s Day. Before I get to anything else, I have to first say a big thank you to Courtney of Neighborfood, queen of the killer pie crust, for inviting me to participate in a virtual “Galentine’s Day” celebration with these very talented bloggers. Definitely take a peek at the fantastic recipes these lovely ladies have put together!

And now, these angel food cakes. As far as Valentine’s Day posts go, I feel like there are a lot of love lessons I could extrapolate from this angel food cake adventure. This very “rustic” (your daily dose of euphemism) mini angel food layer cake. Like … something about not judging books by their covers. And decrepit layer cakes by the sharp angle of their list. Or loving the imperfections. Even when a cake looks so ridiculously sad and lopsided that it makes you want to simultaneously laugh and kill things. Or love is perseverance. And not throwing cake against the wall and watching it smash with vicious satisfaction.

One of my favorite restaurants back home serves a mean creamed corn. Decadent, syrupy-sweet, almost like a custard. (Whenever my dad orders it and the waitress asks if we’d like dessert, he always says, “Got my dessert right here!” and holds it up with big grin. My father is a faithful subscriber to the school of Jolly Dad Banter.) To me, it’s one of the ultimate comfort foods, a dish that typifies warm, indulgent Southern nourishment.

Last summer, I stumbled upon Carey’s gem of a blog, Reclaiming Provincial, by way of this remarkable ice cream — a honey-thyme & blackberry-goat cheese swirl ice cream. Let’s repeat that and just let it marinate for a second. Honey. Thyme. Blackberries. And goat cheese. I can’t remember the last time I’ve so instantly known that something would be delicious. Creamy yet tangy, probably wonderfully smooth, definitely all-around awesome — I was completely captivated.

So naturally, the moment I found myself with a (highly impractical, highly large, but highly coveted) ice cream maker that I’d thrown on my Amazon wishlist for Christmas and just assumed no one would actually buy for me (Lesson #1 in Amazon-Wishlist-Making: Fully visualize the possibility that you might actually own the thing you are carelessly telling other people to spend their money on for you, also, THANKS MA!) I knew I wanted to try making an ice cream like it. (Sidenote: Unfortunately, this does require an ice cream maker. I know, it’s a bummer if you don’t have one…)

But given that this is not quite the season for blackberries, and given that I had just one more pear leftover from the poached pears I made for these pear and almond galettes back in October (yeah, time stops in the freezer), I didn’t make exactly that ice cream. Instead, I went with a riff on Carey’s that incorporates a lot of the same elements, but rearranged a bit — the goat cheese went in the ice cream base, and I pureed the pear with its poaching syrup to make a pear swirl instead.

OK, so I know what this looks like. It looks like another summer recipe. (After I already posted a fall recipe, saying that it’s fall.) But it’s a really versatile summer recipe! You can sub apples and make it a fall recipe! Or sub frozen blueberries and make it an anytime recipe. Plus, some people in the world haven’t even had summer yet. And maybe some people live in a magical place where white nectarines are in season all year long. So I’m going to say it’s appropriate, and just run with it.

Happy Monday! It’s such a foreign idea to me that summer is ending. With the bar exam just a few weeks behind us, it feels like it’s barely begun. Even so, I know I should get my blueberry recipes out of the way now, so here’s the second of the two I made this summer. Last week I posted the first of two blueberry recipes I made this summer, blueberry buckle coffee cake, and today’s recipe is just plain old blueberry muffins.

Just like with chocolate chip cookies, it seems like everyone has their own preference for what the best blueberry muffin should taste like. They can be biscuit-y or cake-y or drier or moister or sweeter or milder; there are variations with yogurt, with streusel topping, with brown butter, with sour cream, with buttermilk and turbinado sugar and everything in between. There have been showdowns. It’s serious business. And overwhelmed by choice, I couldn’t commit to any of them and just went with something simple.

Happy Tuesday! After all the excitement of Sunday, it’s just been sunny peacefulness as usual here. (Phew.) Before blueberries go out of season, I thought I’d share the first of a couple of recipes with blueberries that I made earlier in the summer, during one of those kicks where boxes of fat blueberries are overflowing on the grocery shelves and going for something like a dollar apiece and the sale-monger in you can’t resist buying like four. (Maybe that’s just me.) The first is an amazing blueberry buckle coffee cake recipe from Annie’s Eats, and the second is a simple blueberry muffin recipe that I cobbled together, which I’ll post sometime next week.

OK, so I have two confessions to make. One, I have to admit that I don’t know what exactly makes sangria sangria. Does it have to use wine? Citrus fruit? Liquor? This uses … none of that. So I’m not really sure if it’s sangria at all. (But I promise that whatever it is, it’s still delicious.)

One of the first blogs I ever started following was Cupcakes and Cashmere. It’s remarkable how much my focus has shifted over the last few years in terms of what blogs I like to read; initially it was purely fashion blogs, but as I’ve come to cook more and more, and especially in the years since I’ve come to live in my own apartment, blogs on cooking and interior design have almost totally eclipsed my former interests. The great thing about Cupcakes and Cashmere is that, while I initially found her through her fashion posts, the wonderful mix that she posts of all three of my interests keeps me constantly engaged in reading her blog. A couple of weeks ago, she posted a recipe for a Triple Berry Pie from Cook’s Illustrated (and first made here) that looked absolutely amazing — so, since I’ve never made a berry-based pie before, I thought it was time to try it.

Spicy ahi poke is perhaps my greatest love in the food world. First introduced to me when I visited Bowl #2’s family in Hawaii, poke is pretty much just fresh chunks of tuna marinated in soy sauce and other ingredients. Some describe it as a Hawaiian ceviche, which I find apt but not all-encompassing of its utter perfection (I just describe it as bliss). The standard version is one marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, and a few other ingredients, whereas our personal favorite is a slightly unhealthier, spicy mayo-based kind that we usually get from Foodland, a Hawaii supermarket chain. This particular kind was part 2 of the Hawaiian birthday feast (part 1 is here), and here is the stunningly simple recipe for how to make it!

Hello! It’s been awhile! Pretty much a week after I started this up, I went into a whirlwind month and a half where we took our very last finals ever as students, left Boston, moved to New York (where we had 10 days to furnish our new but totally empty apartment before hosting family), went back to Boston, graduated from law school, visited family, and ended up back here mostly intact, when we are now supposed to be studying for the bar. Supposed to. Most relevant to this blog, however, is that I also acquired a hand-me-down digital SLR! So I can hopefully start posting pictures that are a little more palatable.

So — to start, last week was Bowl #2’s birthday! He’s from Hawaii and misses it constantly, and since we aren’t going back until after the bar this summer, I thought I’d do the typical thing, “bring Hawaii to him,” and make him his favorite Hawaiian foods. We had a little feast of spam musubi, spicy ahi poke, and butter mochi for dessert. Here’s the first recipe of the three — spam musubi.